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Acme Bar & Grill Will Be a “New, More Upscale Restaurant”

May 12, 2011

Earlier this week, Acme Bar & Grill owner Bob Pollock confirmed to us that is partnering with the Indochine/Kittichai team in the restaurant replacing Acme, which had been a Great Jones Street fixture for 25 years. Today, Pollock contacted us with the following statement about “Acme’s evolution.”

For 25 years, Acme Bar & Grill was one of NYC’s favorite comfort food joints — mouthwatering ribs and barbecue, satisfying Po’ boys and a great selection of beers to wash it all down. But comfort food is taking a new, more healthy turn these days and I, owner of both Acme and Buttermilk Falls Inn + Spa, Millstone Organic Farm and most recently Henry’s Farm to Table Restaurant in the quaint Hudson Valley Riverside town of Milton sees [sic] an opportunity to combine my interests and offer an upgraded and healthier experience to his city clientele. With the re-opening of the Acme space as a new, more upscale restaurant (still to be named) Millstone Farm will be supplying produce and other seasonal fare grown on the farm, as well as meats and dairy products sourced locally from the Valley’s many local producers.

Since we already are sourcing almost all of our food and ingredients locally for the Inn’s and Henry’s kitchen’s there is an economy to us is supplying the city operation. For our chefs there is enormous benefit in having direct access to the farms and producers, and for our customers there is the ultimate benefit on the plate. We’re excited about the future prospects for the Acme space and will have more concrete plans to announce soon.

When we followed up with Pollock, he told us that the restaurant is undergoing “more extensive work than we thought we needed to do” — it requires, among other things, new exhaust and air-conditioning systems and larger gas lines, and has also suffered significant water damage. Despite it all, Pollock hopes that the restaurant will open by the end of June.

As for the farm-to-table concept, he says that his Indochine/Kittichai partners, Jean-Marc Houmard, Michael Callahan, and Huy Chi Le, are “starting to pick up” on it. “I have enough farms and meat purveyors locally,” he says. “And it’s a marketing tool we could use.”

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